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At the Doctor
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Asking for a Friend Not Her
LAYTONTwenty-four hours and still no word from Marissa. I consulted with a new client in the morning. An interesting man who wanted to build an off the grid tree house to live in about an hour outside the city.The project was bound to be both challenging and something totally different than anything I was used to. I was excited to get into it, but struggling to concentrate on the design.Sitting behind my drafting table, I stared down at the empty sheet of paper in front of me. My pencil clutched between my fingers, I had yet to draw so much as one line.Marissa was on my mind. I kept wondering what she might think of the project. I wondered if she would be as excited about it as I was, and I looked forward to seeing how she put the reports on this one together.The client was adventurous, but his budget didn’t match his dream. To say it would be tight was an understatement. There was no doubt in my mind that if anyone could put it together inside budget and make his residential dre
Asking for a Friend Nothing More Than a Boss
LAYTONFrowning, she seemed surprised by the question. She brushed a tendril of hair that had escaped off her forehead and tucked it behind her ear. “She’s okay. It was only a stomach bug. She’s already feeling better. Thanks for asking.”I waited for her to continue, to explain why she hadn’t told me about Annie. She didn’t say anything though. It looked like she was, very uncharacteristically, at a loss for words.“Why didn’t you tell me about her, Marissa?” I asked quietly, crossing my arms as I leaned against the windows behind my desk. “You should have told me you were a mom.”She bristled visibly. I could practically hear her defenses slamming into place. “Why?”Her tone was challenging, flat. “Why should I have told you? You’re my boss, Layton. I haven’t told anyone here about Annie, why would I have told you?”Everything about her screamed defiance. She was cold and withdrawn, defensive. I sighed, running a hand through my hair. I didn’t want to fight with her, but things seem
Asking for a Friend Thanks for the Favor
LAYTONFreezing rain pelted the office windows, the skies angry and miserable. I stood with my back to my office, staring at the Boston skyline –what little of it not obscured by the weather. Lightning cracked the sky in half, adding to the general gloom outside.It wasn’t much better in my office. Sighing, I dragged my hands through my hair. In the two weeks since Marissa came into my office and went off about how we had to forget anything ever happened between us, we’d managed to avoid each other.It was no easy feat in an office the size of ours, but I hadn’t so much as caught a glimpse of the buxom blonde who had intrigued me as much as she’d annoyed me from day one. The last two Fridays, I’d let my second in command handle the weekly staff meetings.Marissa had sent the reports she needed to get to me via email to my assistant, and several times had dropped documents with her. One morning I arrived to find a pile of papers neatly stacked on my desk.The loopy handwriting on the n
Asking for a Friend You Look Like Hell
LAYTONThe old tick to modulate my urges to set things straight had returned with ten times the intensity it had before I met her. For a couple of days there, I learned to let things go, to let them just be the way they are around her. She brought organizational chaos wherever she went and somehow, I managed to relax my urge to correct it around her.Those days were long over. Horrified, I watched the stack of papers wobble, but Marissa didn’t even seem to notice. Meeting my eyes again, she gave me a pointed look. “Was there anything else you needed?”“Not a thing,” I said curtly, then gave her a quick nod and walked out of her office.I didn’t thank her for the reports or for promising to get the work done by day’s end. There was no need. She was just an employee and I was just her boss. If I had to run around thanking every one of my staff members for doing their work, I wouldn’t get any of my own done.On my way to my car to meet Craig at the site, I shook out my tense muscles. My
Asking for a Friend Not His Fault
MARISSADays at the office dragged on and on. The clock seemed to have slowed down, hours passing as slowly as an antagonizing snail. One who knew you’d bet on him and was intentionally showing you why it had been a mistake to do so.At the same time as it felt like years had passed since that day in Layton’s office when I broke things off, it also felt like the conversation had happened mere minutes ago.With the stubborn refusal of the hands on the clock to move at any freaking decent speed, I had way too much time to think about the man in the office on the other side of the building. I found myself bracing for when I would finally see him again, both hoping I would and dreading the minute it would happen.When he came to my office earlier, it was all I could do to not burst into tears. I hated the distance between us, the frigid tension. I wished more than anything that things could be different between us.Those few weeks I’d spent being more than just his employee—if not as his
Asking for a Friend Friendly Advice
MARISSADenise and Annie were in the living room when I got home, crafting blobs out of pink playdoh. Coaxing a bright smile onto my lips despite my melancholy, I shrugged out of my coat. “What have you two been up to?”Annie whirled around at the sound of my voice, excitedly and proudly displaying a misshapen figure on her palm. “We’re making dinosaurs. Look at this one, her name is Dippy.”“Dippy?” I asked, crouching down to give Annie a hug and get a closer look at Dippy the wannabe dinosaur. She had what might have been a long neck, a bubble of a body and four balls as feet. No head as far as I could see. Certainly no features that distinguished her as a dinosaur instead of an elephant-in-the-making. “Did you have fun making Dippy?”Annie nodded enthusiastically, giggling as she introduced me to several equally indistinguishable pink dinosaurs. The simple act immediately snapped my head back to those silly fantasies, making me wonder what Layton’s reaction might have been to being
Asking for a Friend Hounding From Beyond the Grave
LAYTONWaking up to an unexpected knock on your door on a Sunday was never fun. No one actually wanted to have people over on a Sunday morning. It added insult to injury that it was early, I rolled over in bed to look at my clock and groaned, it was only seven-fifteen in the fucking morning.Another, more insistent knock sounded just as I burrowed back into my pillow and decided to let whoever was outside rot in their effort to wake me up at this unholy hour of a Sunday. The knocking turned to pounding and finally, I couldn’t ignore it anymore.Irritably getting off my bed, I pulled on a pair of navy drawstring pants and yanked a college t-shirt over my head before I stalked to the door. If one didn’t want to be bothered on a Sunday morning, there was only one thing more annoying than being woken by an incessant pounding on the door. Opening it only to find your late father’s lawyer on your doorstep.Oh, hell no. My mood darkened to the blackest depths of the deepest ocean when I saw
Asking for a Friend Puzzle Pieces
LAYTONFor some reason, my hands started trembling as I clicked in and selected a program to open the video with. Get it the fuck together, Layton.The picture that came up on my screen was of my father’s office in his building in Boston. There was some movement, as if he was setting the laptop or webcam down where he wanted before sliding in behind it.On the walls behind him, I could see several works of art that had moved with him from home to every office he’d ever had. There was a painting of a sailboat sailing into the sunset. Without being able to see it on the video, I knew the name printed on the back of the boat was Jolene. My mother’s middle name.There was another painting of a lion, one he had commissioned from a photo he took while on safari in Africa. A blueprint design of his first jet hung next to the lion.An unexpected wave of emotion hit me in the chest when I thought of those frames sitting in an exhibit dedicated to him that I hadn’t even visited yet. It intensif
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